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I found a man dead behind the auction box last October. Not dead. I want to say that first because I lied a little for the hook, and you deserve to know. He was alive. But when I climbed down off my stand and walked around behind it and saw Eldon Pritchard sitting on an overturned milk crate with his head between his knees and his face the color of dishwater, I thought he was gone. I really did. I'm getting ahead of myself. My name is Wendell Cobb. I'm 63 years old and I've been calling cattle sales at the Bowling Green Stockyard in Kentucky since I was 25 years old. That's 38 years up on that box. 38 years of Tuesday and Thursday sales. 38 years of holding a mic and reading a crowd and pulling bids out of farmers who came to town telling their wives they weren't going to spend a dime. My voice is how I feed my family. It's how I put both my girls through college. It's how I paid off the little farm my wife Darlene and I have out on Tarter Road. It's how I bought Darlene the kitchen she always wanted when she turned 55. My voice is the only thing I've ever been good at. And last October, in front of 200 buyers, I opened my mouth at the start of a sale and nothing came out. Let me back up. This thing has been building for a while. I just didn't want to look at it. The first time it happened I was 58. Late fall. The cold came in off the holler and I went down with what felt like a regular bug, and then it sat on my chest for 6 weeks. I missed three sales. I'd never missed a sale in my life. My boss, Ronnie, who's been running that stockyard since Reagan, called me at home and said "Wendell, take the time, we'll get a fill-in." A fill-in. I'd never had a fill-in. I came back hoarse and pushed through and the voice came back about 70% by Christmas. I told Darlene it was fine. She gave me the look she gives me when I'm full of it. The next fall, same thing. Started in October. Lost the second week of bidding. Came back. Lost it again the week of Thanksgiving. By spring sale season, the voice still wasn't right. I sounded like I'd been gargling gravel. The auctioneer's chant, that fast pretty roll that I'd spent two decades perfecting, was coming out flat. Buyers were squinting at me. Couldn't catch the numbers as fast. A rancher named Buford Tate came up to me after a sale and said "Wendell, you alright son? You sound rough." He was 81 years old and calling me son. I went to my doctor. Dr. Bell. Good man. He looked down my throat, ran some bloodwork, told me I had post-viral inflammation and that "at our age" sometimes these things take longer to recover from. At our age. Dr. Bell is 4 years older than me. I wanted to ask him what age that was exactly. He gave me a prescription for steroids. They helped for two weeks. Then the voice slid back down. The third year was worse. I caught something in October, then something else in November, then a third thing in January. By March I'd missed 11 sales in 5 months. Ronnie didn't call this time. He just put my name down for fewer dates on the spring schedule. The fill-in was a young guy from Glasgow named Trey. Good caller. Real good. The buyers liked him. I sat in the back of the sale barn one Thursday in April and watched him work my box and I felt something I'd never felt in my life. I felt replaceable. I drove home that day and I didn't tell Darlene I'd gone. I told her I'd been at the feed store. She knew I was lying. She didn't push. She's good like that, Darlene. She lets a man lie to himself until he's ready to stop. By the time I hit 62 it was a pattern I could set my watch by. First cold snap, I went down. Second cold snap, I went down again. The bugs the grandkids brought to Thanksgiving knocked me out till New Year's. I started keeping a little notebook by the bed counting the days I was actually well in a given month and most months it was less than half. Less than half. I'm telling you that out loud because I never even said it to Darlene. A man whose voice is his job, going hoarse half the year, watching a 31 year old kid from Glasgow call his sales while he sits in a recliner with a heating pad on his throat trying not to cough. That's what I was when I climbed up on the box last October 14th and opened my mouth and nothing came out. Let me describe what that's actually like. You take a breath. You feel the air go in. You set the cadence in your head, you got 200 buyers looking at you and a pen of 14 black baldies milling in the ring, and your mouth opens to start the bid and what comes out is a kind of wet click. Like a key turning in a broken lock. I tried again. Same click. Then a wheeze. Then a sound that wasn't a word. The room went quiet in a way I'll never forget for as long as I live. I felt Ronnie's eyes on the side of my head from over by the office. I felt Trey, sitting in the second row because he was working the next sale, lean forward. I felt my own hands start to shake on the mic. I cleared my throat. I tried one more time. I got the first call out. It was wrong. The cadence was off. The pitch was cracked. A buyer in the front row, Jim Ed Hatcher, who'd been bidding at my sales since 1992, looked down at his boots out of pure embarrassment for me. Embarrassment for me. I made it through that sale. 31 head. Took 4 times as long as it should have. Sold the last cow for $200 under what she should've brought because I couldn't get the chant going to push the bidders up. When I climbed down, Ronnie didn't look at me. I walked out the back of the barn into the cold and I sat down on the loading dock and I cried. 63 years old, sitting on a loading dock at the Bowling Green Stockyard, in a Carhartt jacket, crying like I was 8. That's when I went around to the back of the box to get my coat and I found Eldon. Eldon Pritchard is 71 years old. Retired large-animal vet. Worked this stockyard since I was a kid up on his daddy's farm. He was at the sale that day because he still buys a few head every fall for a little hobby operation he runs out behind his house. He was sitting on the milk crate with his head between his knees. I thought he was having a heart attack. I dropped down beside him and put my hand on his back and said "Eldon, you with me? You with me?" He looked up. Eyes wet. Shook his head. "I'm alright Wendell. I'm alright. I'm just sitting here because I couldn't watch you up there. I couldn't do it." I'll be honest with you. I didn't know what to say to that. He patted the milk crate beside him. I didn't have a milk crate so I sat on the cold concrete. We sat there for a long minute. Then Eldon said "Son, my daughter sent me something out of Colorado about 14 months ago. I been meaning to tell you about it for a while. I should've told you sooner. I'm sorry I didn't." I'm going to tell you what Eldon told me, but first I want to tell you the part you need to understand. Because if I'd just heard "supplement" right then I would've waved him off the way I'd waved off Darlene's sister who's always pushing something on us. Eldon is not a supplement guy. Eldon is a man who spent 41 years sticking his arm up the back end of dairy cows. He's a science man. He reads. He's the only person I know who keeps actual journals on his nightstand instead of just a Louis L'Amour. His daughter Cassidy lives in Boulder. She's a research librarian at the medical school out there. She had sent him a folder. An actual folder, in the mail, the old way. Articles printed out. Studies. Things she'd dug up because Eldon had been telling her on Sunday calls that he kept catching every bug that came through the holler and his immune system felt like it had quit on him at 70. The folder, Eldon told me, sitting on that milk crate, was mostly about garlic. Not the garlic in your spaghetti. Not the powder you shake on bread. A specific compound inside garlic called allicin. Eldon, in his vet way, broke it down for me like I was one of the slow farmers he used to deal with. I appreciated that. He told me that the body has front-line immune defenders. Cells that sit right at the entry points, your nose, your throat, your gut, and their whole job is to catch a bug the second it gets in and address it before it ever gets a chance to take hold. He said when those defenders are sharp and active, you don't get sick. The bug shows up, the defenders handle it, you never feel a thing. He said when those defenders are sluggish, bugs slide right past, set up shop, and you go down for two weeks. He said the research his daughter sent him kept pointing to one thing those defenders needed. A sulfur-rich signal. A specific kind of compound that humans used to get every day because every culture from Italy to China to Egypt was eating raw pungent things at every meal for 5,000 years. We don't eat that way anymore. The grocery store garlic is mostly dead by the time it hits your kitchen. You cook it in olive oil and the heat finishes off whatever was left. The compound, the allicin, isn't there anymore. So those front-line defenders have been running on empty for a generation. Decades. Eldon said his daughter had told him there were a hundred garlic supplements out there and most of them were also dead. Powders that had been heat-processed. Capsules that had been sitting on a shelf in a warehouse in New Jersey for 18 months. He said most of them might as well be sawdust. But one she'd found, she kept coming back to in her research. Something called Alevia Garlic Extract. The way it was made, the allicin actually survived all the way to your gut, where your body could use it. He said when he started taking it 14 months ago, he didn't notice anything for the first 9 or 10 days. Then around day 12 he said he woke up and realized he hadn't woken up in the night. He'd been getting up at 3 AM for two years to hack and clear his throat and he just, didn't. Then around week 3 his daughter called and he realized halfway through the call that he wasn't tired. He was just talking to her like he used to. Then November came. November always took him down. He didn't get sick. Then December. The grandkids came up for Christmas with their daycare bugs. He didn't get sick. Then January, February, all the way through, he didn't go down once. He looked at me on that milk crate and he said "Wendell, I'm 71 and I just had the first full winter of my life where I didn't lose 6 weeks to being sick. I am telling you this because I watched you up on that box just now and I have known you 38 years and I am not going to sit in this barn and watch you lose your voice and your job because nobody told you." I want to tell you what I did next, but I want to back up one more time, because I know what some of you are thinking. You're thinking, garlic? My grandma cooked with garlic. I cook with garlic. What is he talking about. That's the part that took me the longest to wrap my head around. The allicin compound, the active part, it isn't even in a clove of garlic until that clove is crushed. And the second it's crushed, it starts to degrade. Heat finishes it. Stomach acid finishes whatever's left. So when you sauté garlic in a pan, by the time it hits your plate, you're eating something that smells like garlic but doesn't have the active compound left. That's why the stuff in your spice rack, the powder, the pre-minced jar in the fridge, the capsules at the drugstore, the cloves from the grocery store, can't really do this job. The signal your front-line defenders are looking for isn't there anymore. The Alevia formulation, Eldon told me, is built specifically so the allicin survives all the way through. That's the whole thing. It's not magic. It's not a miracle. It's the same compound humans have been getting for 5,000 years, finally delivered to the part of you that's been waiting for it. The other thing Eldon told me, and I'll be honest, this was the part that closed the deal for me, was the smell. I said "Eldon, I cannot stand up on a box 6 hours at a time reeking of garlic. I'll lose every buyer in the building." He laughed. He actually laughed. He said "Wendell, that's the whole reason I was scared to try it. My wife would've put me out on the porch. It's odorless. No breath. No sweat. Nothing. I've been taking it 14 months and Marlene has never once said a word. I asked her last week if I smelled like anything and she said 'soap, why.'" Odorless. Made in the USA. 90-day money-back guarantee. I went home that night. I told Darlene the whole story. I cried again at our kitchen table. She listened the whole way through and then she got up and got her laptop and ordered me two bottles before I'd finished my coffee. That was 11 months ago. I want to tell you what happened, but I want to tell it the way it actually went, because I don't want you to think it was a lightning bolt. The first week, I didn't feel anything. I'll be honest, I called Darlene at lunch one day and said "I don't think this is doing anything." She said "Wendell, you been hoarse for 4 years. Give it a minute." Week two, I noticed I'd gone to bed without a heating pad on my throat. Hadn't done that in years. Week three, my morning voice came back. The one I'd had at 45. I caught myself singing along to George Strait in the truck on the way to a sale and I had to pull over because I hadn't done that in I don't know how long. Week four, I called a sale all the way through without losing the chant. Week six, the first cold snap of the year hit. The bug went through the stockyard. Two of the ring men went down. Trey went down. Ronnie went down. I didn't go down. I kept showing up. Tuesday, Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday. October became November became December. The grandkids came for Christmas with their preschool bugs. I held the baby. I didn't go down. I called every sale on the schedule for the first time in 5 years. Spring came. I was still calling. Ronnie pulled me aside in February and said "Wendell, whatever you're doing, keep doing it." I told him about Eldon. About the folder. About the allicin. Ronnie ordered some that afternoon. Trey ordered some when he saw Ronnie order some. Buford Tate, the 81 year old who'd called me son, ordered some when he heard me telling Ronnie about it at the coffee pot. I'm telling you all this because I know what it feels like to be the man on the box who can't get the words out. I know what it feels like to sit in the back of a barn watching a kid from Glasgow do your job. I know what it feels like to keep a little notebook by the bed counting your well days because you can't bear to tell your wife the number out loud. If that's where you are, with your job or your grandkids or your church or your shop or whatever it is that being well enough to show up to actually matters for, I want you to know there's a reason your body's been letting you down. And it's not because you're old. It's not because this is just aging. It's because the signal your front-line defenders have been waiting for has been missing for a long time. Alevia Garlic Extract is what brought it back for me. Odorless. Made in the USA. They give you 90 days to try it, and if it's not the right fit for you, you send the bottle back and they refund every penny. No questions, no fuss. That's the only reason I let Darlene order it that first night. I figured if Eldon was wrong, we were out a shipping label. He wasn't wrong. I'm 63 years old. I called the spring bull sale last month start to finish, three and a half hours on the box, and when I climbed down Buford Tate was waiting at the bottom of the steps and he shook my hand and he said "Wendell, you sound like you did in '98." '98. 27 years ago. If you want to feel like yourself again, the way I do, you can find it here. 👉 https://alevia.com/garlic/7 P.S. I went and saw Eldon last week out at his hobby place. He was up on a ladder painting his barn. 71 years old, on a 12 foot ladder, in November. He came down and we sat on his porch and drank coffee and he told me his daughter Cassidy was coming home for Thanksgiving. I told him to tell her thank you from a man she's never met. He said he already had. P.P.S. The 90-day guarantee is real. I asked, because I'm a stockyard man and we read the fine print. You order it, you try it, if it's not doing for you what it did for me you ship the bottle back and they refund you. That's it. The only thing you risk is the time it takes to find out. P.P.P.S. I will tell you what Eldon told me on that milk crate. He said the supply gets tight in the fall because that's when everybody figures out they can't keep going down every winter. He said to order before the cold snap, not after. I'm passing that along the way it was passed to me. 👉 https://alevia.com/garlic/7